Featured in Architecture & Design

Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Joy Gao talks about how database streaming is essential to WePay's infrastructure and the many functions that database streaming serves. She provides information on how the database streaming infrastructure was created & managed so that others can leverage their work to develop their own database streaming solutions. She goes over challenges faced with streaming peer-to-peer distributed databases.

Articles

Integrating tools used in software development and delivery is very hard. Getting endpoints to inter-operate is not a purely technical challenge, it’s more of a business problem. While there are a few choices in selecting the technical integration infrastructure (integration via APIs or at the database layer), the real challenges have more to do with friction caused by the dissimilarities.

This article describes two novel practices for continuous delivery: Latent-to-live code pattern and Forward compatible interim versions. You can use these practices to simultaneously increase speed and reliability of software development and reduce risks. These practices are built on top of two other essential continuous delivery practices: trunk-based-development and feature toggles.

Mirco Hering explains why we shouldn't leave COTS products (and the people working on them) left behind in a DevOps world. With creative solutions we can apply good practices from custom software. This leads to a significant effort reduction in the long term.

The article discusses a catalog of configuration smells containing 13 implementation configuration smells and 11 design configuration smells. It provides a few examples of configuration smells along with corresponding refactorings, explains their impact on the quality of the project, and lists a few tools that could be used to reveal such smells.

This article is about understanding Git – both its benefits and limits – and deciding if it’s right for your enterprise. It is intended to highlight some of the key advantages and disadvantages typically experienced by enterprises and presents the key questions to be contemplated by your enterprise in determining whether Git is right for you and what you need to consider in moving to Git.

Patrick Debois, part of the team that organized the first DevOps Days and who coined the term DevOps, ran the Config Management Camp panel "Next Steps in Configuration Management", featuring Luke Kanies, Puppet author and Puppet Labs CEO, John Keiser, development lead at Chef, Thomas Hatch, Salt author and Salt Stack founder, and Mark Phillips, director of business development at Ansible.

"The Docker Book", by James Turnbull, is a hands-on book for everyone who wants to learn about Docker. It will take you from your first installation, through simple examples that explain Docker's concepts, to more complex scenarios that shed some light on how you would use Docker on the real world. InfoQ took the opportunity to hear the author on the book and Docker.

Taste Test, by Matt Jaynes, is a book that uses a simple scenario to compare Ansible, SaltStack, Chef and Puppet. On the recently released 2nd edition it adds new chapters on Docker, the communities around the tools, and how they fare on security. InfoQ took this opportunity to talk with Matt to know more about his thoughts on the tools and his approach to configuration management when consulting.

Configuration management tools are a hot topic on the DevOps community and IT organizations in general. InfoQ reached out to users of each of the major tools (Ansible, CFEngine, Chef, Puppet and SaltStack) to ask them about their experiences. Why did they choose a given tool? How was the tool introduced in the organization? These are some of the questions they answered.

How should organizations plan for a cloud environment and optimize it for efficiency at scale? InfoQ reached out to 3 leading cloud practitioners to uncover practical advice on this topic. Each panelist has dealt with the sometimes-messy transition from on-premises to cloud, and coached organizations through their journey.